Cardinal Financial accelerates innovation with automated workflows in Asana

Highlights

Challenges

• Disconnected tools and inconsistent processes made it difficult to track accountability and keep work on schedule.

• Limited visibility into project statuses slowed down decision-making across teams. 

• Dependence on individual knowledge for key information forced teammates to waste time tracking down the details they needed.

Solutions

• Established Asana as the central platform for all work, providing one trusted place for real-time visibility across departments and projects.

• Standardized and automated key processes—such as broker onboarding and product development—using templates, forms, and rules that keep steps consistent and guarantee nothing is missed.

• Centralized all communication and progress updates, helping teammates and leaders stay in sync on priorities and timelines.

• Assigned a clear owner and due date for every piece of work, empowering leaders to track progress and act quickly when bottlenecks arise.

Outcomes

• Accelerated innovation by automating manual work, allowing teams to focus on advancing Cardinal Financial’s custom-built loan origination system and the broker and borrower experience. 

• Enhanced visibility and ownership across departments, allowing teams to consistently meet critical delivery timelines. 

• Improved efficiency and consistency across key operations, leading to smoother product rollouts and faster broker onboarding.

• Reduced time spent searching for information, as centralized records capture decision history and documentation for all future work. 

Asana connects every part of our business, helping us automate the work that slows teams down so we can focus on innovating for our brokers and borrowers.”

Asana for Company-Wide Use

A company-wide foundation for coordination and execution

Cardinal Financial has relied on Asana since 2012. Today, the platform acts as one trusted place for all work. Teams across the company use Asana to coordinate projects, track goals, and share progress—all without internal email. Requests, deliverables, and updates live in Asana, giving leaders instant visibility into how work moves across the organization.

This company-wide approach has transformed how Cardinal Financial executes work. With custom API integrations, AI features, and automated workflows, Asana has become the collaborative infrastructure that connects every team and propels the organization forward.

One platform that guarantees consistency and clarity 

• Teams manage company communications and internal collaboration directly in Asana, which eliminates internal email and keeps conversations tied to actionable work.

• Shared projects help teams collaborate easily across all functions and roles.

• Dashboards, portfolios, and reporting provide real-time insight into strategic initiatives, allowing leaders to manage progress effectively. 

• Goal management connects high-level objectives to daily tasks, keeping priorities clear and aligned.

• Centralized meeting agendas and notes boost accountability by making it easy to capture, track, and follow up on every action item. 

• Consistent employee onboarding and offboarding processes ensure information is gathered, organized, and executed consistently.

• Automated workflows and templates guarantee consistency across high-impact work, from product updates to broker onboarding.

Asana for Operations

Managing broker and vendor relationships in a single, connected hub

Cardinal Financial’s Counterparty Risk team manages relationships with a large network of brokers and vendors, maintaining compliance with regulatory, bank, agency, and investor requirements. Their work spans every corner of the business—from vetting new brokers to managing vendor renewals—requiring streamlined coordination, clarity, and documentation. 

By moving these workflows into Asana, the team established a trusted place for all third-party relationships. Every decision, document, and comment lives in Asana, giving leaders a clear view of progress in real time and streamlining collaboration between cross-functional teams. 

A connected workflow guides every step of broker onboarding

• Standardized project templates guide every new broker through the same steps—from intake to licensing and pricing—ensuring accuracy and compliance.

• Custom fields track SLAs, ownership, and status, while dependencies clarify sequencing and reduce delays.

• Due diligence steps are broken down into tasks, keeping the process consistent and compliant, with sensitive details private to the Counterparty Risk team.

• Leaders can instantly see where work is stuck, while vendors and brokers benefit from faster decisions and a smoother onboarding experience.

• Each onboarding project captures the full history of tasks, documents, and decisions, creating a reliable reference for future renewals and reducing back-and-forth.

A standardized process ensures secure, transparent escalations

• When escalations arise during broker or vendor reviews, the team manages them confidentially in a private Asana project.

• Automated routing assigns the right reviewer (such as legal, compliance, or finance) and sets deadlines to keep work moving.

• Decisions and comments are logged directly in the private task, maintaining accountability while protecting sensitive details.

• Summaries are shared back to public projects, providing clarity while protecting privacy. Asana AI empowers clear and professional communication 

• Across every workflow, the team uses Asana’s AI features to keep communication clear, professional, and consistent.

• Smart editor automatically refines phrasing, grammar, and tone, so updates are consistent, well-written, and professional. 

Asana helps us manage due diligence efficiently, ensuring we provide both our vendors and brokers with the best possible experience.”

Asana for Product

Streamlining product development to fuel innovation

Cardinal Financial’s Product Engineering team develops Octane, the company’s custom-built loan origination system. Octane powers the work of internal teams, brokers, and borrowers, making it central to the company’s strategy. 

Before Asana, product development relied on inconsistent checklists and manual updates. Now, the team manages the entire Octane development lifecycle in Asana, automating routine steps and standardizing how work moves from intake to launch. Engineers spend less time on coordination and more time on innovation, while every stakeholder stays informed.

A standardized process keeps work intake clear and actionable

• Requests enter Asana through a standardized intake form that captures key details like stakeholder priority, department, issue type, and task category.

• Once submitted, each request automatically becomes a task in the Product Engineering team’s inbox, where leaders review, approve, and assign ownership.

• Approved requests are automatically routed directly into the Product Engineering Work project, making the next steps clear and accountable.

Templates and automations guide consistent execution

• When a request is approved, a rule automatically generates a standardized task template with predefined subtasks, ensuring every project follows the same reliable process from development through rollout.

• Rules automatically route cross-functional work to the right teams, guaranteeing handoffs happen quickly and nothing falls through the cracks.

• Custom fields and dependencies make steps clear and help leaders track progress in real time.

Transparent communication keeps stakeholders aligned

• All relevant teams and leaders are added as collaborators on the main development task, giving them a full picture of progress and next steps.

• Task owners share updates directly in the task comments, cutting out the need for extra check-ins.

• Project views help leaders monitor workloads and timelines, making sure high-priority initiatives stay on track and correctly resourced.

We use Asana to manage the entire lifecycle of our software stories, from intake to launch. Every story is tracked as a task, so nothing gets missed. It’s our central place for managing work.”

Conclusion

Defining the future of mortgage lending with AI and operational excellence

After more than a decade of innovation with Asana, Cardinal Financial continues to push what’s possible, focusing on using AI to simplify operations and enhance how teams work. Looking ahead, Cardinal Financial plans to expand its use of Asana’s AI features, including AI Studio, to automate even more workflows and eliminate administrative tasks. 

By integrating AI deeply into everyday work and giving each teammate more time for high-value, strategic projects, Cardinal Financial is able to focus on what matters most—simplifying lending and bringing clarity, confidence, and speed to every borrower experience.